


what the sunflower sprout wrote about love

by fumerie (grisclair)



Category: Super Junior, Super Junior-M
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-30
Updated: 2011-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:45:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grisclair/pseuds/fumerie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zhou Mi is good at smiling. Some other people suck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what the sunflower sprout wrote about love

-

  
"You have a really nice smile," the girl said as her lips left his, the kiss soft and smelling like orange-flavoured candy, which was probably the flavour of her lip gloss. "Has anyone ever told you that?" She laughed at his bewildered expression.

"Uh. Yes." She was not the first one, but they had hardly known each other for more than a few hours. It was his goodbye party before he boarded the plane to Korea, and his friends had practically invited everyone in the university and their aunt. "But I'm not... I mean..."

"I'm glad." The girl patted his cheek, grinning. Her smile was nice as well, he wanted to say, but she was already rising up from her seat. "Keep smiling."

 

_'This child has a nice smile, he will go far in life,' 'When you smile, you look like a sunflower blooming,' 'Just smile, and you'll have the world at your feet.'_

The thing was, Zhou Mi had never been able to believe any of those words.

 

"Okay, you have a naturally bright smile, but there's still room for improvement." The coach scrutinized his face after she told him to smile. Over and over. His facial muscles were starting to ache. "Don't show your teeth too much, pull your lips over them, yes, like that. Curve your lips up a little more. Don't squint your eyes, that isn't attractive. Don't smile too wide either, it will eat up your face."

"Remember you _always_ have to have the smile on. Especially at airports, especially when there's a fan or a camera around. Doesn't matter if it's only one fan or one camera, you have to smile. I don't care if you're having a potentially fatal fever or hanging on your one hour of precious sleep the night before or whatever the hell the excuse is, you _have to_ keep the smile on. Is that clear?" The manager frowned at them, and Zhou Mi thought for someone that was always lecturing them about smiling, he should have been more cheerful.

At least it was simple for him to perfect the perfect smile. Zhou Mi was someone who had a lot of smiles, his friends always said, so it didn't matter that his feet were burning from dance practice or the chants were getting louder than usual, the smiles came on autopilot. The lessons really came in useful, he supposed. They were not really lessons on smiling per se, but lessons on how to arrange facial muscles, Kyuhyun always said.

Kyuhyun. Kyuhyun was really honestly pretty bad at it. "Your smile looks pasted on," the coach would grimace and hiss at him.

"Yeah, your face is kind of vacant," Ryeowook chipped in from the corner of the room. Kyuhyun sent him a sideway look, the lower half of his face remained the same in the shape of a smile.

"Whatever, I passed this course ages ago, I don't even know why we have to be here again. Do we have to smile a different way in China or something?" Kyuhyun poked at his own cheeks. "Hey, Zhou Mi, how do you smile in China?" Kyuhyun thinned his lips into a wide smile, squinting his eyes in an attempt to imitate him, and Donghae slapped his head.

Kyuhyun wasn't exactly held in high regards as the one with a nice smile in their coach's book, but Zhou Mi still thought Kyuhyun had a really cute smile. "It's his cheekbones," Zhou Mi sighed into his phone to his friend, "he has such nice bone structures. His face is harmonious."

"I'm going to pretend I know what that means," his friend laughed on the other end of the line. "Go for it, Zhou Mimi!"

"Ha ha ha, very funny." Zhou Mi rolled his eyes, shuffling the cards with Korean vocabulary on his bed. "He's cute, yeah, but he's a cute straight Christian Korean boy. Even I wouldn't waste my time on it."

"Yah, you think the whole country haven't seen you smile around him? Sunflower blooming in the sun, seriously! I had to cover my eyes in front of the tv screen!"

Zhou Mi's hands stilled. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Stop talking about sunflowers, I've just eaten sunflower sprouts the other night!"

 

Zhou Mi spent most of his time onstage staring at Kyuhyun's vacant smiles, since most of the time no one was speaking to him anyway. Well, except for Kyuhyun who couldn't stop whispering nonsense to him.

"I'm so bored, are you bored?" At least Kyuhyun was pretty good at keeping his vacant smile on as he bitched about their schedules. "I have no idea if that host just asked me to sing a song or kick a chicken but whatever, hey. Don't laugh, you're not supposed to laugh, you're only supposed to smile. Geez, for someone who has a 'natural' smile you need to get more training. But whatever, Sungmin-hyung is praised by that woman all the time too but I find his smiles so creepy. Okay, not exactly but he keeps practicing in our room and after a few months it's really creepy. Don't you think so?"

"...No?" Zhou Mi had never talked to Sungmin much, but the man was nice enough in his book. Really cute as well, but that was a little irrelevant.

"Okay, don't tell Sungmin I said that."

 

Zhou Mi told Sungmin this story a few years later, when they were all in Taiwan and a part of Super Junior M and in the middle of an intense drinking session. Sungmin reached over and slapped the side of Kyuhyun's face with a stuffed giraffe.

"Hey, don't abuse my giraffe!" Ryeowook snatched it back, but not before slapping the other side of Kyuhyun's face with it as well.

Sungmin laughed, and Zhou Mi decided his laughter was ridiculous, but his smile was still really cute.

 

This one time, Zhou Mi walked in while Sungmin was massaging his facial muscles.

"You okay?" Zhou Mi blinked.

"Yeah, just achy from smiling too much. I don't know how you do it, smiling _and_ talking non-stop." Sungmin patted his cheeks. Zhou Mi had to resist the urge to reach out and pat them, too.

"Yeah, you get used to it. It's my job to talk."

"I'm glad it's not my job to talk."

Zhou Mi paused, looking over to Sungmin who was looking for something in his bag.

"I know it's hard right now but... it gets better. All of the others could barely speak Chinese when we started out, too."

Sungmin sighed lightly, running a hand through his hair. "It's not about the Chinese, you know that. I just don't talk. Eunhyuk only knows one sentence and he does just fine."

Zhou Mi sat down next to the other man. "It gets better." Sungmin stared back at him. There was a moment when he thought the curve of Sungmin's lips looked perfect.

"Did it for you?"

 

This one time when he took Sungmin back to the dorm from a dinner at the Taipei 101, Kyuhyun was sitting in the living room, gaming away. This was strange, because if he was alone, Kyuhyun usually gamed in his own room. He didn't say anything when Sungmin was there, but when the older man finally wandered off to his room, Kyuhyun suddenly caught up to Zhou Mi in the hallway.

"You took him out to dinner?"

"Yeah?" Zhou Mi smiled, a little perplexed by Kyuhyun's furrowed brows and pursed lips. "Did you want take-out or something? You could have texted me."

"No, it's... okay, take-out would have been nice, but what I mean is..." Kyuhyun shook his head. "I haven't seen that for a while, but when you were with him just now, your smile was like this." He made a blooming gesture with his hands. Zhou Mi laughed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about it."

Kyuhyun pursed his lips again. "Nevermind. But I'm not stupid, okay?"

"I know you're not, Kyuhyun." Zhou Mi patiently nodded, the smile still on his face. Kyuhyun paused for a bit, looking a little awkward and ridiculous in his floral pyjama. 

"Okay. Good night." Then he turned on his feet and stalked back inside. 

"Good night."

Zhou Mi was really not that stupid either. His phone suddenly vibrated. One message.

_'hey how was hot date!'_

Zhou Mi laughed. His friend was ridiculous. He was never telling anyone about these things again. He typed his reply on his way back to his own dorm, a smile tugging at his lips.

_'not a date! korean boys in crazy boy bands are too much work.'_

-


End file.
